Thread by @conspirator0

What does "normal" Twitter traffic look like in terms of what percentage of it is automated/from accounts with default pics/new accounts etc? It turns out that the baseline values differ depending on tweet language.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We downloaded 100K random tweets in each of 9 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (We did this by choosing 1000 random cutoff times between Feb 8 and Feb 16, and downloading the preceding 100 tweets in each language.)

The percentage of tweets sent via automation apps (based on the "tweet source" field) varies widely by language. Tweets in Japanese have the highest rate of automation (16.9%) of tweets, with Arabic on the low end at only 0.9%. 5.9% of English-language tweets are automated.

For all nine languages, the most common app is one of the official Twitter smartphone apps, but whether Android or iPhone is dominant varies. Japanese and Korean are the only languages where the automation app twittbot accounts for at least 5% of the traffic.

For all nine languages, the most common app is one of the official Twitter smartphone apps, but whether Android or iPhone is dominant varies. Japanese and Korean are the only languages where the automation app twittbot accounts for at least 5% of the traffic.

What percentage of "normal" Twitter traffic comes from accounts with default profile pics? It again varies by language: they show up more than twice as frequently in Chinese tweets (4.7% sent by accounts with default pics) than any other language we checked.

Finally, the proportion of tweets handled by each of Twitter's datacenters varies from language to language. (Datacenter info is encoded in tweet IDs, along with a few other things - more info in the linked blog post.)
blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…